Dies Irae
by Unoriginality
Summary: <html><head></head>Edward comes to a horrifying conclusion in London.</html>


There were no mirrors in Edward's room. There had been one, on the dresser on the far side of the room from his bed, but even just one night of watching it, seeing his reflection staring back at him, seeing the broken condition his passing to this world had left him in, had been one too many, and he'd demanded his father remove it from the room, loudly and angrily, flinging whatever he could reach at the glass to illustrate his vehement stance on the subject.

Hohenheim had taken it out without argument.

Edward hadn't noticed when the damn thing found its way back into his room again, probably sometime after he was no longer bedridden, fitted with prosthetics that amounted to little more than sticks attempting to look like an arm and leg. They weren't terribly functional, but they were something to fill his shirt sleeve and something he could walk with, if extremely carefully and with the aid of a cane, and they were the best this miserable world could offer him, so he didn't complain where he could be heard about them.

He would've thought he'd have noticed the mirror, honestly. The days following his arrival were spent in his room, rarely straying from there. The only places he could go were the other rooms of the upstairs apartment; he almost never went outside, where pitying eyes could be turned on him, his limp and the cane and the way his arm hung limply at his side telling more than he wanted anyone from this foreign world to know.

_Poor little cripple boy. Too young for such tragedy._

Edward hated pity. He was certain he couldn't take it, even less so than he could've when he was younger, when his automail made him stand out.

So he hid. He locked himself in his room, thumbing through volumes of textbooks his father provided him, trying to acquaint himself with the science of this world, more out of a desperate desire to _hide_ in something he could grasp and understand than any real hope of finding answers to the millions of questions that ran through his head, blurring together until it was just a constant heaviness, an oppressive, strangling _numbness_ that haunted his dreams and weighed down on him.

There was nothing to go back to, after all. He couldn't feel Alphonse, and even trying to focus, to make himself think of ways to get back to Amestris without alchemy just brought that inescapable pain crashing down on him.

He honestly thought he would've noticed the mirror back in his room.

His morning routine was monotonous, never varying. He got up, he brushed out the tangles in his hair and pulled it back into a sloppy ponytail, and he got dressed. His nightly routine was just the reverse of that; he brushed out his hair, he changed for bed, he slept. The light on the table by his bed burned low as he tossed the rubber band onto the nightstand, picking up his brush and pulling it through his hair without much thought.

Silently, he limped over to the dresser, working open the buttons of his shirt as he went, glancing at the clock. He was turning in early, far earlier than he had the last few days; the clock still read half past seven. Idly, he wondered if his father would come upstairs to check on him, or to offer him dinner.

Edward didn't feel like eating.

Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and he froze, glancing over. Gold eyes stared back at him, and his breath caught and congealed in his throat- _you understand, right?_ -and then released shakily as he realized that it was merely his own reflection, nothing else. Mentally berating himself for being so skittish, he stepped over to the mirror, looking at his reflection a moment before reaching up to flip the mirror over.

The action pulled on his shirt, and he paused, frowning and lowering his arm. He studied his reflection, leaning in closer to the mirror, fingers brushing against the glass. Straps across his chest held the wooden limb to his body- they were temporaries, he remembered the doctor mentioning the possibility of aluminum prosthetics -almost making him look like a prisoner in his own body.

That wasn't what caught his attention though.

Edward was used to scars; the entire area of his right shoulder was nothing but scar tissue, a few thin lines straying down to his chest from the automail surgery. He knew them all by heart, had seen them enough times over the years that he knew what marks his sins had written onto his body.

There was a new scar he'd never seen before.

It stretched out across the center of his chest, an angry red, twisting his flesh and spiraling outward, like the flesh had been stretched and pulled inward.

_You must understand, right?_

"Edward?"

Edward didn't answer, didn't react to the sound of his father's voice on the other side of the door, didn't look up when the doorknob clicked and the hinges creaked as his father stepped into the room. They were distant, muffled, inconsequential past the staticky numbness that settled over his mind, freezing his thoughts.

_You must understand, right?_

"Edward, what-"

Swallowing tightly, Edward turned his head to look at his father, wide-eyed and pale. _(There's a scar there, it was real, he really killed me, Al brought me back, and now I'm _here_ and my alchemy won't work and I was _dead_-)_

Hohenheim looked taken aback by his son's expression, and frowned. "Edward, what is it? What's wrong?"

The smile that tugged at one corner of Edward's lips was disbelieving, borderline crazed. If he was dead, if he'd been brought _back_, if he couldn't transmute anything anymore... "Father?"

His hand dropped from the glass as he turned to face the older man. "Am I dead?"


End file.
